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I spent most of the last year reporting two sieges, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, which finally ended with the decisive defeat of Isis. This was the most important event in the Middle East in 2017, though people are already beginning to forget how dangerous the Isis caliphate was at the height of its power and even in its decline. Not so long ago, its “emirs” ruled an area in western Iraq and eastern Syria which was the size of Great Britain and Isis-inspired or organised terrorists dominated the news every few months by carrying out atrocities from Manchester to Kabul and Berlin to the Sahara. Isis retains the capacity to slaughter civilians – witness events in Sinai and Afghanistan in the last few weeks – but no longer has its own powerful centrally organised state which was what made it such a threat.

The defeat of Isis is cheering in itself and its fall has other positive implications. It is a sign that the end may be coming to the cycle of wars that have torn apart Iraq since 2003, when the US and Britain overthrew Saddam Hussein, and Syria since 2011, when the uprising started against President Bashar al-Assad. So many conflicts were intertwined on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields – Sunni against Shia, Arab against Kurd, Iran against Saudi Arabia, people against dictatorship, US against a variety of opponents – that the ending of these multiple crises was always going to be messy. But winners and losers are emerging who will shape the region for decades to come. Over-cautious warnings that Isis and al-Qaeda may rise again or transmute into a new equally lethal form underestimate the depth of the changes that have happened over the last few years. The Jihadis have lost regional support, popular Sunni sympathy, the element of surprise, the momentum of victory while their enemies are far stronger than they used to be. The resurrection of the Isis state would be virtually impossible.

But the defeat of Isis in its heartlands has not produced the rejoicing that might have been expected. This is partly because people are uncertain that the snake is really dead and rightly fearful that Isis can kill a lot of people in its death throes. I was in Baghdad in October and November where there are now fewer violent incidents than at any time since 2003. Compare this with upwards of 3,000 people blown up, shot or tortured to death in the capital in a single month at the height of the Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war in 2006-7. At that time, Iraqi young men would have their bodies tattooed so they could be identified after death even if they were badly mutilated. Only 18 months ago, a bomb in a truck in the Karada district of Baghdad killed at least 323 people so Baghdadis are understandably wary of celebrating peace prematurely.

Yet there is a good chance the period of wars and emergencies that have battered Iraq for the last 40 years are coming to an end. There is no home-grown insurgency powered by foreign states in the offing. Beyond its borders, the northern tier of the Middle East between Iran and the Mediterranean, stretching through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon appears to be stabilising.

The new area of instability in the Middle East today is further south in the Arabian Peninsula where turmoil rapidly escalated in 2017. The stalemated war in Yemen is now the bloodiest and cruellest in the region, with eight million Yemenis facing famine because of the Saudi-led blockade; there are over one million suspected cholera cases, the biggest outbreak of the disease in modern history.

Much of the destabilisation of the Arabian Peninsula stems from the proactive foreign and domestic policies of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) which have made the Saudi Kingdom, once staunchly cautious and conservative, the regional “wild card”. Some of his actions, such as the reported detention and enforced resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Harari, have a comic opera aspect to them, but others are more serious.

When President Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May, MbS must have felt that the winds of change were blowing in his favour. But few things have worked out as expected: Trump pleased his Saudi hosts by blaming all the troubles of the Middle East on Iran, but so far the anti-Iranian thrust of US policy has remained largely rhetorical. The main Saudi initiative in the Gulf has been the blockade of Qatar which has so far achieved little for the Kingdom and the UAE, aside from pushing Qatar towards Turkey and Iran. This confrontation has produced some light relief with furious exchanges between the UAE and Turkey, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tweeting the UAE foreign minister: “When my ancestors were defending Medina, you impudent [man], where were yours?” On the Red Sea side of Saudi Arabia, Sudan is considering withdrawing its troops from Yemen where they have provided many of the ground forces for the Saudi-backed coalition.

The US and the West Europeans treat Saudi Arabia as if it was a regional hegemon in the making. Their motives are self-interested and they obviously want to go on selling arms to the Kingdom and its remaining Gulf allies. But events in the Arabian Peninsula over the last year illustrate a general truth about oil states: their money may buy them power and influence up to a certain point, but their operational capacity is much more limited than they imagine. This is true of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iraq and even little Iraqi Kurdistan which unwisely aspired to be a new oil-rich emirate.

ORDER IT NOW

The recent history of these states illustrates a general rule: possession of great revenues from oil, gas or any natural resources such as minerals breeds arrogance and self-destructive ambition. When King Idris of Libya was told in the 1960s that oil companies had found oil in his country, he is reputed to have replied: “I wish you people had found water. Water makes men work. Oil makes men dream.” The quotation is a little too pat, but everything that has happened in the Middle East and North Africa over the last half-century has underlined the truth of his remark. Oil money can achieve only so much: it can buy expensive modern weapons, but it cannot win wars as we are seeing in Yemen. It can buy allies but they do just as little as they can for their pay and their loyalty ends just as soon as the money runs out.

The good news for 2018 is that the barbarous wars in Iraq and Syria may finally be coming to an end. Not only do Iraqis and Syrians and their neighbours benefit from this; what happens in the region soon has repercussions for the rest of the planet, as we saw when the invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned al-Qaeda into a mass movement and finally produced Isis, a militarised cult of demonic savagery. Whatever else happened in the world in 2017, the destruction of the Isis caliphate has made it a good year.

(Republished from The Independent by permission of author or representative)

While we may now be seeing the Syria/Iraq wars wind down, there’s every reason to expect a ferocious effort on the part of Israel to wind them back up again. Israel is not going to give up the enormous benefits of having their neighbors in chaos, and will do everything in their power to make sure these wars continue. An Israeli friend of mine says his news from Israel is that the next great war is coming, in which Israel will be forced to deal with the threat of Iranians in Syria, and occupy most of that country to keep Iran at bay.

Israel may respond to the loss of these small wars by arranging for a much bigger one.

Mr. Cockburn has entirely elided the vicious influence of Israel on affairs in the Middle East and the malignant ability of Israel’s neocon and Zionist agents in the USA to control that country’s foreign policy in dangerous ways that favor only Israeli interests. It is also disconcerting that the two most powerful and corrupt theocracies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, seem to be covertly colluding to preserve and extend one another’s regional influence. This does not bode well for the peoples of the region nor for world peace.

I agree that the future of the Mid East depends upon Russia. The USA has so debased its reputation as an impartial judge, that its opinions are laughable; and its economy is so bankrupt that its promises of future commitments are worthless. In spite of its reputation of ruining everything and fixing nothing, America thinks that its useless and biased presence is welcome.
Russia, by contrast, saved Syria and immediately withdrew their military. It, seemingly, feels that it has no business sticking around in the Mid East. That has to have irresistible appeal to groups like the Palestinians. Everyone (except the “bad guys”) loves the Lone Ranger. Come into town, clear-up the problem, and then ride back out of town.

There will continue to be unrest and war in Syria and Iraq as long as the cause for the existence of a caliphate remains: the neo-crusades. For the same reason the Taliban will not disappear in Afghanistan.
The neo-crusaders are us, NATO, and Israel.

The war against Iran has begun as CIA/Mossad funded “orange revolution” money has incited minor protests that will be major protests in the American media. Crazies in Congress will demand that we free Iran, even though it’s a rare democracy in that region and much freer than our allies there.

The US is openly deploying thousands more troops to Afghanistan and Iraq to outflank Iran. Israel announced that it will protect its new lands in Southern Syria. It used proxy forces to take over another 40km of Syria north from the Golan Heights and said it will continue to bomb Syria at will and that Assad still must go, something General Mattis has said as well.

Last week Michael Makovsky, President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), and a former Pentagon official wrote:

“Maintaining Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen in their existing forms is unnatural and serves Iran’s interests. There is nothing sacred about these countries’ borders, which seem to have been drawn by a drunk and blindfolded mapmaker. Indeed, in totally disregarding these borders, ISIS and Iran both have already demonstrated the anachronism and irrelevance of the borders.Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen are not nation-states as Americans understand them, but rather post-World War I artificial constructs, mostly created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in a colossally failed experiment by international leaders.

…President Trump should take the offensive to Iran. The current political structure of the Middle East serves Iran’s interests, and it’s time to upend it.”

Despite all this open source news, we have this expert Cockburn saying nothing to see here, all is peaceful now. Does anyone think the Imperial US war machine will now demobilize and Israel will abandon the Yinon plan?

and Syria since 2011, when the uprising started against President Bashar al-Assad.

Uprising? Hardly. When the USA got money from KSA and Qatar, and support for the soon to be ISIS training bases in Jordan and Turkey, then trained tens of thousands of violent wanna-be Jihadis, armed them, paid them and helped transport them into Syria to set off what American NGO’s and the unhinged Hillary Clinton’s SD had already been priming, the overthrow of Assad to benefit Israel, that is NOT an uprising or civil war, that is an invasion that continues to this day, with the US shipping more troops and hundreds of tons of weapons into their illegal NE Syria bases.

Now they will use the fig leaf of supporting the equally violent Kurds and the SDF to keep up the attacks against Syria, while Trump the Mad tweets and sonny boy Jared calls the shots in these never-ending ‘Wars for Wall Street and Israel.’

Your Israeli friend needs to come back down to Earth. Israel will be “forced to deal with the threat of Iranians in Syria, and occupy most of that country…”? Occupy most of that country. Israel was unable to send men as far as the Litani River in Lebanon against a determined Hezzbollah in 2006, and today, in 2018, against hardened SAF, Iranian and Hezzbollah forces they are going to occupy most of Syria. They will be sent home with wet diapers, of that you can be sure. Israel isn’t going to occupy ANYTHING. Any massive air bombardment, which is of course how they always start these things, will be answered with missile attacks reaching all the major cities in Israel. They will bluster and make noise, try to push the US to attack Iran, set up and arm proxy forces, but they will NOT send their men into Syria; there are hungry Iranian and Hezzbollah wolves just waiting for that eventuality.

Even if the wars “come to an end” (which they won’t), there is a huge investment to be done in reconstruction. Where is the money, manpower, skillbase and the production chain for that going to come from? Well, maybe China will be ready to deliver whole towns, ready-to-use, on loan.

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What do you mean "unnecessary war"? Every war is necessary to someone, besides the fact that somebody makes a whole lot of money from them. In this case Yemen is a necessary prelude to any war with Iran. The Saudis need an Indian Ocean port for their oil for the eventuality of the closing of the ...

If the net effect of the Kashoggi killing is to finally put an end to the brutal war on Yemen, then it's all for the best. But I hope no one here is still buying the story that official Washington has turned against MBS because of 'human rights' or some other non-sense like that. Here's the real ...

The big losers in the Senate vote on Yemen were Israel and Trump's State Department; but, I repeat myself. Trump may well succeed in docking the tail that wags the dog through his support of Israel and its projects where others failed through their opposition. If so, this vote on Yemen is a wel...

It's hard to know where to begin with this. Indeed, it's the kind of article which makes one despair of the modern Left.
'divided by race'
Britain was 99.99% white in 1948 and approximately 98% as late as 1980. It only changed because of mass immigration no one ever voted for.
Indeed it ...

Britain could achieve a greater degree of formal self-determination outside the EU, though everybody in the country would be considerably poorer.
Sorry, but this is propagandistic nonsense. Some may be poorer, some richer, but most will remain about the same. I miss the other Cockburn--the on...

Michel Houellebecq
It’s my belief that we in Europe have neither a common language, nor common values, nor common interests, that, in a word, Europe doesn’t exist, and that it will never constitute a people or support a possible democracy (see the etymology of the term), simply because it ...

I think I don't understand what are you trying to say, but anyway, Jews are white, aren't they? In fact, the vast majority of them in the world are from slavic ethnic stock, pure Europeans, not even a drop of Middle East blood, if this sentence makes any sense at all.
But, this is all bullshit...

When all the silver coming from the colonies went, it started on a series of Civil Wars from 1820 onwards, to finish with the worst one of all of them, paid and sponsored by the Nazis (who were fascinated by the cleanness of Imperial Spain)
seems unlikely
are you sure your real name isn't "...

Wow.
I've never been in Britain (in a dozen European countries, but never in Britain), but I've read some literature. Yes, most of its history, at least as formally UK since 1707, it has been a white country what this sentence could mean. The fact is, in despite of being white, Britain was dee...

Clueless Cockburn never once mentioned the zombie hordes of Fake Englishmen invading Londonistan at the behest of the EU. What did you think Brexit was about?
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Dsi4yq9WoAAH_xA-600x262.jpg